My Experience Using an Expert Historian During the Book Revision Process
It was my editor’s idea to hire a queer historian for my second book, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth. It probably should’ve been more on my mind—I was writing a historical fantasy with an autistic, transgender protagonist, an extremely complex combination—but thanks to second-book burnout and my new day job, I was more focused on cobbling together a halfway decent story than double-checking 1883 glove etiquette. I’d even forgotten to confirm the historical average temperature of a London November. Who cares if it wouldn’t be snowing yet? I had a brand new 9-to-5 and a plot that was an utter disaster.
(When Is My Novel Ready to Read?)
But my editor knew the historian personally. As it turns out, so did I. And in my exhausted haze, I must have agreed to it, because one day I received a 10-page-long essay detailing everything I’d gotten right, and glaringly wrong, about everyday life and queer existence in Victorian England.
I had exactly two weeks to handle this, along with copy edits and a final opportunity to fix the book’s third act.
I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off.
Turns out, this was one of the best things I could have done.
First, though, a digression: The piece of advice I give to authors facing down their first edit letter is that trying to swallow it whole will just lead to you choking on it. It’s huge, and daunting, and editing your book is scary enough without the sting of an expert saying you’ve messed up. So I did what I tell every author to do, and started hacking the letter into pieces.
Everything I did right, everything the historian congratulated me on, got copy-pasted to the top of the document. (You have to soothe the ego somehow.) His excited over mentions of James Barry, my accurate clothing descriptions, any time I nailed the social mores of the era, that would go right front and center. Then came the errors that were easy to fix. My protagonist’s father wouldn’t be smoking in public? Fine, the other characters will call him uncouth for it—see, that’s character building. The aforementioned glove etiquette errors? Easily addressed with half a sentence.
(5 Research Tips for Writing Historical Fiction.)
The hardest part, of course, was what remained. The missteps that would take a sickening amount of work. The only way I’ve found to tackle these while retaining my sanity is to reduce each critique, often paragraphs long, to a single actionable sentence, and then—if I’m on a time crunch—go into triage mode.
I devoted a few days to adjusting my protagonist’s experiences with queer culture to what it would’ve really been, as I decided that would be the highest priority. Then I learned I’d completely forgotten about Victorian chaperoning rules, an issue that would take weeks to fix properly, so the only manageable solution was finding an in-universe explanation for why those rules could be broken. I turned in my fixes in a hotel room, frazzled and overwhelmed, half an hour before I was due on stage to introduce The Spirit Bares Its Teeth to the American Booksellers Association.
Check out Andrew Joseph White’s The Spirit Bares Its Teeth here:
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All of this work was so, so worth it—and not for the reasons you’d expect.
Don’t get me wrong, it certainly made the book better. Even if you can brush off anachronisms by saying, “Of course it’s not exact, this is an alternate history,” books like Spirit still require a hardy grounding in our world to make the fantasy aspect work; the horror hits best when it feels like it could be real. Nailing small pieces of historical accuracy breathes life into stories about fanciful societies and ghosts.
However, while I wrote this book to do a lot of things, to celebrate my autistic identity and explore queer rage, I wrote it mainly to remind my young queer and autistic readers that people like us have always been here. Whether or not we were recognized by society or had words for what we are, we have always existed. Spirit was to be an accessible bridge between modern understandings of our communities and prior ones. In a world where our histories are often obscured by uncertainty, censorship, and the evolution of language, this felt like the least I could do for the next generation.
This historian’s letter took me one step further. The truth is, I didn’t know how much I didn’t know about queer history in Victorian England. I had done my best to research, but I hadn’t known where to look, where to read between the lines. Even if there was so much information in that 10-page letter that I couldn’t fit into Spirit—the protagonist is the self-isolating type, unfortunately, so details about queer community at the time are wasted on him—it was a shocking reminder of my own message. We’ve always been here. Tales of “female husbands” would show up in the cheap newspaper. Theater provided all kinds of places to play with gender. Laws were being passed against crossdressing that threw wrenches into our daily lives.
All I could think was that history repeats itself, doesn’t it? There’s no difference between the cheap newspapers and today’s reactionary news mocking pronouns; queer children still flock to theater in an attempt to show their true selves; trans people nervously watch local news stations to see if their legislators have finally decided to turn on them. God, I thought, history is a flat circle.
And after turning in that final round of edits, I contacted the historian directly to thank him. Not only did the book feel more vivid, more alive, but I felt like I’d been brought closer to my queer ancestors myself. Look how much has changed. Look how much has stayed the same.
Every one of my books, apparently, teaches me a little bit more about myself and my world. With my debut, Hell Followed With Us, I discovered an autistic identity that I’d suppressed and ignored for two decades. With The Spirit Bares Its Teeth, I was given a chance to reach back in time–with the help of an amazing researcher–and prove to my young readers that we are closer to our history than we think.
If you are an author with the opportunity to speak to an expert, take it. Ask if your publisher will front the cost, if you have one. Learn everything you can. Delight in it. Not only will your book be richer for it, you will be too.